Soapy Smith, King Con A Biography of Alaska's Most Feared Outlaw

Jefferson Randolph "Soapy" Smith was a Western crook with the gift of organization. A southern charmer and a master of the bait and switch, he was a confidence man who dressed like a judge, sat on a horse like a prince, and spoke like a bishop. He honed his skills in Texas and Colorado. Gradually he gathered shills and toughs around him, and commanded his gang of "lambs" as a colonel might command a battalion. When the Klondike Gold Rush began in 1897, he knew that the tenderfeet headed for northern goldfields would be ripe for the picking, and chose raw, lawless Skagway as his headquarters. In this bleak settlement at the head of Alaska's Lynn Canal, he constructed an empire that any Mafia don might envy. However, less than a year later, the town had had enough of Soapy. This is a rip-snorting portrait of the rise to power of a man without a conscience. It reveals the strong-arm robberies, bloody trail murders, illegitimate businesses, rigged card games, and garish, candle-lit honky-tonks of the Gold Rush, illustrated with period photographs that show Soapy and his gang from their glory days to his autopsy in 1898. SOAPY SMITH, KING CON is the first new biography of this notorious character in many years, and Alaska historian Jane Haigh (GOLD RUSH WOMEN, page 75; GOLD RUSH DOGS, page 75; and CHILDREN OF THE GOLD RUSH, page 73) has uncovered new evidence of Soapy's early misdeeds deep in the stacks of the Denver Library.Jane\Haigh is the author of 'Soapy Smith, King Con A Biography of Alaska's Most Feared Outlaw' with ISBN 9780973268362 and ISBN 0973268360.